EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 7/13/17

I’m going on Hour 8 being stuck in an airport and I’m getting a little punchy. My flight has been delayed a couple of times and I’m now looking at getting to my destination airport at 2:45 a.m. I’ll then have another hour drive to my client, assuming I find an alert taxi driver at that hour since a rental car will be out of the question.

My road warrior readers know what this is like, but for those of you who haven’t spent a good chunk of your lives at the whim of the airlines and the weather, please have pity on the rest of us when we arrive tired and perhaps a little bedraggled. Hopefully the old residency adage that “a shower is worth two hours of sleep” will hold enough to get me through the day.

The airport I’m in has a number of seating areas with electrical outlets, but unfortunately none of them work. Airport decision makers that are OK with that sort of thing should be forced to spend a couple of days stranded at their workplace, left in limbo without charging their phones or using electronic devices yet still being responsible for their daily work.

As long as my battery lasts, it’s a good opportunity to catch up on some vendor updates and try to make a dent in my email backlog. I’ve unfortunately already finished the novel I brought for emergencies, so I may have to break down and go back through security to hit the bookstore, which is bafflingly not in the actual gate area where all the captive people are.

CMS released an article about the “modernized National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES)” which is used for providers to obtain and maintain their National Provider Identifier (NPI) number. The document is heavy on detail, but from what I gather, they’re making the process around non-individual providers more secure and efficient. Not surprisingly, people responsible for maintaining the IDs of hospitals, nursing homes, and physician groups were sharing credentials, which helped lead to the changes. New fields have been added to PPES to document provider-specific information such as languages spoken, race, ethnicity, accessibility, hours, and the provider’s direct email address.

I’m fine with most of that information being collected since I have to provide it every year on various credentialing applications. Hopefully it will be shared somehow so I don’t have to fill it out over and over. I’m not about to provide my direct email address, however, without understanding how it’s going to be used and who will have access.

CMS also published the 2017 CMS Quality Reporting Document Architecture Category III (QRDA III) Implementation Guide Version 1.0 for Eligible Clinicians and Eligible Professionals Programs. For anyone suffering from insomnia, I highly recommend it as an alternative to the Federal Register or Ambien. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the document or who have never heard QRDA, it’s the recipe for electronic exchange of clinical quality measure data. Vendors must keep expert resources on staff who not only know the material, but who can expertly digest updates to the specifications and deploy them to developers, engineers, and more. It’s incredibly dense information and I admire the people who master it and make the world safe for those of us who need to report quality measures.

I’ve received some feedback on my recent piece on training and adult learning. Most of it has been of the “right on” variety, but one shameless vendor used it as an opportunity to try to guess what hospital system I use and market their simulation software. There wasn’t even a decent introductory greeting, just a link to HIStalk and straight into the sell. Any vendor who thinks that kind of approach works is sad. 

One reader noted, “I have deployed and trained everything from a full EHR to portals to secure messaging to population health. The percentage of clients who let me apply even basic adult learning principles was sadly very, very low. Yet, as we know, the downstream impact of poor and/or incorrect or irrelevant training lasts for years.” I have good data on the costs of retraining as well as the loss of productivity after poor training and I drag it out frequently to convince reluctant practice leaders to do the right thing.

Early bird registration is now open for the AMIA 2017 Annual Symposium in Washington DC in early November. This year’s theme is “Precision Informatics for Health: The Right Informatics for the Right Person at the Right Time.” I like the fact that they used “person” rather than “patient” because we need to continue to understand the impact of technology on the users, not just on patient outcomes. There are days where I feel like I’m a human participant in an unregulated study that some deranged Institutional Review Board approved without regard to the safety of its subjects.

AMIA has also opened submissions for the Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) program, which aims to bring research communities together around the challenges of designing, implementing, and evaluating interactive health technologies. The theme for WISH is “Citizen Science: Leveraging interactive systems to connect to our data, our families, and our communities.” Submissions are open through August 7.

There are entirely too many conferences going on during October and November, so it’s going to be a challenge to decide where to spend my travel dollars. In addition to industry meetings, several friends are headed to a patient safety conference in New Orleans and it’s awfully tempting to select that over the technology offerings, especially when gumbo and beignets are on the line. I also have to start thinking seriously about my primary care board certification, which is coming due faster than I hoped, so that will factor into the conference shopping process as well.

One trip I did decide on is my semi-annual pilgrimage to put my toes in the sand and think about little more than whether I am reapplying sunscreen often enough. I’ve got my coverage arranged and am looking forward to being disconnected from my clients, at least for a couple of days.

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